Can Political Life Follow Art? : Troubled Peru Looks to Unusual Option for Presidency

The presidential election in Peru today is especially noteworthy. For one thing, it may be the last Peruvian election for many years if spreading political violence continues. And the political figure expected to win today is not a politician or even a typical Latin American caudillo like Pinochet or Castro. Instead, he’s an artist: Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s best-known novelist and a writer of international renown.

Does an artistic background preclude someone from holding such high office? Don’t tell that to playwright Vaclav Havel, who emerged to lead Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. But Peru needs more than a Velvet Revolution; it needs an economic miracle. In fact, most Peruvians would be elated to be as comparatively well off as folks are in the Eastern European nations shrugging off the bonds of Soviet communism.

For generations, Peru has been plagued by runaway inflation, high unemployment and abysmal poverty. And it has precious little capital to invest, or buy, its way out of the financial hole it’s in. This has created social divisions--not just between rich and poor but also between mestizos and Indians--that are at the root of a bloody guerrilla war being waged by a fanatical Marxist group, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).

Led by ideologues, these throwback rebels would cast democracy aside in favor of a back-to-the-land movement akin to that imposed on Cambodia by the savage Khmer Rouge, the only foreign Communists that Sendero Luminoso leaders admire.

So, in a conjunction of events that could have been lifted from the fantastical novels that Vargas Llosa himself has written, Peru’s voters might today turn away from career politicians and hand the helm of government to a revered writer, hoping that he can steer them through the rough waters over the next five years.

Some of Vargas Llosa’s admirers fear that Peru’s military, already widely criticized for the repressive counterinsurgency tactics it is using against the guerrillas, might force the soft-spoken novelist to become a civilian puppet who would preside over a right-meets-left blood bath in the Andes that would rival anything seen in Central America. In an interview with Times correspondent James Smith, which appears on Page 3 of this section, the novelist says that won’t happen, and that human- rights abuses in Peru will end not just because they are morally repugnant but also because they are counterproductive. Still, Vargas Llosa concluded that interview saying--perhaps only half-jokingly--that he hopes the book he writes about his presidency won’t be a horror story. Not only Peruvians but admirers of his novels all over the world ardently hope Vargas Llosa is right.